The Hobbies Physicians Give Up — And How to Get Them Back

Guitar. Running. Cooking real meals. Woodworking. The things that made you a person before medicine consumed the time. They're still available to you.

Before medical school, you had a life that included things that had nothing to do with medicine. Instruments you played. Sports you competed in. Things you built or grew or cooked. Creative pursuits that existed purely because they brought you joy and had no professional utility whatsoever.

Most physicians can tell you exactly when those things stopped. Residency is the usual answer — when 80-hour weeks left no margin for anything. Some of it came back as an attending. Some of it never did. And then the documentation burden grew, and the evenings filled up again, and the hobbies became the things you used to do.

What hobbies actually do for a physician's brain

This isn't sentiment. The neurological case for physician hobbies is solid. Engagement in creative or skill-based leisure activates different neural networks than clinical work — it exercises the brain's default mode network and reward circuitry in ways that pure rest doesn't. Musicians, athletes, and craftspeople who happen to be physicians show lower burnout scores across multiple studies, not because the hobby reduces work stress but because it provides a psychological domain where the physician is not the expert responsible for outcomes.

You can play a wrong note. You can miss a shot. You can burn dinner. Nothing bad happens. That psychological freedom — the permission to be unskilled, to learn, to fail without consequence — is deeply restorative for people who spend their working lives in high-stakes environments.

The hobbies that tend to survive medicine

Physicians who've maintained hobbies through demanding careers share patterns:

  • Running and cycling: time-flexible, can fit 30–45 minutes before work or during lunch, built-in health benefit makes it easier to justify the time
  • Music (especially casual playing, not performance): 20 minutes at a guitar or piano is a complete unit of restoration — no performance pressure, pure engagement
  • Cooking: converts a necessary task (dinner) into creative engagement; works well when the evening isn't consumed by charts
  • Reading (non-medical): the physicians who read novels consistently report lower burnout than those who don't — fiction specifically appears to support the empathy pathways that clinical medicine depletes

    • The hobbies physicians most want back

    In physician surveys about what they miss most about their pre-medicine or early-career lives, the answers cluster around the same things:

  • Golf (mentioned so often it's almost a cliché, but genuine)
  • Playing a musical instrument
  • Regular exercise beyond survival maintenance
  • Cooking real meals instead of food assembly at 8pm
  • Being present at their kids' activities instead of half-present
  • Travel that actually happens, fully, without the laptop

    • The actual obstacle

    Every one of these hobbies requires the same thing: time. Not large amounts — 45 minutes of guitar, a round of golf on Saturday, a real dinner cooked on a Tuesday. But time that currently belongs to documentation overflow.

    Physicians who eliminate after-hours charting — consistently, structurally, not just on easy weeks — describe a specific rediscovery process. The first week, they don't know what to do with the evening. The second week, they remember. By the end of the first month, the guitar is out of the case. The running shoes are dirty again. Dinner actually gets cooked.

    Pick one thing you gave up. Start by creating and reviewing one note during the free 24-hour proof.

    Get the evenings back. Fill them with something that's yours.

    Create and review one note during the free 24-hour proof.